About SCBWI

Hi Jimmy   Yep, that's how our system is set up.  The contact list comes from our own database (outside contact contact), and that can change at any time (a new member joins, someone registers for an event).  So even the same filtering ("extract all current members") can be different 5 minutes later.  Thus we do not re-use the contact list.   Re your suggestion to "... add coding to remove contact list ..." - would that be using the api as I mentioned in my earlier post?   - get an array of *all* email lists (using the api) - that array has the create and modify date of each email list - iterate through the array and delete (using the api) all email lists > 2 months old (or additional/other criteria)   Thanks, Josh   ... View more

Hi David   Thanks for your reply.   Here's more detail of our process ...  - We're a membership organization, and we group our members into about 80 geographic "regions" worldwide.  - Our website has 80 subdomains, one for each region.  - Each subdomain has an admin page that has an "email blast" function - That function uses the api to send emails via our single constant contact account. - Each region has an admin person that emails it's members using the 'email blast'   Here's the issue re email lists ...   Our 'email blast' interface allows the admin to filter members based on various criteria (current member, past member, membership expiration date, conference attendee, et al).  Because of this filtering, we can't re-use lists that are already uploaded to constant contact - we have to create a new list each time we upload, based on the filtering criteria.   Thus - after a few months of 80 regions sending multiple emails, we can quickly accumulate several hundred email lists.   Currently, every now and then, I log onto constant contact and manually delete email lists to get us down to 700 or so, and then monitor until we get to 950 or so, and then delete again.  This is obviously fraught with issues, most often being that I forget and we hit 1000 email lists, and then our program hangs on the api call to upload the list, and the admin person emails me to delete lists...   I'd like to automate the list management, and one idea I have is ... every time the api is invoked to send an email ...   - get an array of *all* email lists (using the api) - that array has the create and modify date of each email list - iterate through the array and delete (using the api) all email lists > 2 months old (or additional/other criteria)   Do you think that sounds reasonable, or is there an easier way?   Thanks, Josh       ... View more